PositiveThe Guardian\"... language is generally spare and efficient... and its two principal characters are stripped of virtually all their individuality ... It would be deflationary to deduce from this that Eggers thinks progress is a Bad Thing. Rather, his allegory is designed to make us realise the dangers of \'improvements\', when their use is exploited by those who control the levers of power. His novel may be sternly reduced in terms of its cast and language, but this leanness doesn’t diminish the strength of its argument.\

Jean Moorcroft Wilson

RaveThe SpectatorJean Moorcroft Wilson\'s...book tells only the first half of Graves’s story, but adds a valuable degree of detail to the several existing biographies and, thanks to the sympathy it shows for all aspects of Graves’s character, is consistently illuminating ... It also, by promoting a curious combination of devotion and dissociation in his sensibility, seems to have given a governing shape to the marriage he made shortly before the war ended — to Nancy Nicholson, with whom he had four children. For the same sort of reasons it even more decisively affected the life they subsequently shared with Laura Riding in a ménage à trois that, before it finally and notoriously ended with Riding and then Graves jumping out of windows in a flat in Hammersmith ... In the closing pages of the book, we see Graves and Riding living alone together in Majorca, with money in the bank, thanks to the success of Good-Bye to All That, swaying in a precarious balance for which they have paid a very high price in terms of friendship with others. We also understand there’s not a hope in hell it will last. Cue volume two, which Moorcroft Wilson says she looks forward to writing, and we should look forward to reading.

Tessa Hadley

PositiveThe Guardian\"[Hadley\'s] particular strength is to combine a deep excavation of human frailty with compassion for its effects. Late in the Day, her seventh novel, is no exception ... Hadley presents every member of her quartet in bright primary colours ... All the scenes are adroitly handled, as one would expect: action and description are well balanced, and the materials of the book (the food, the drink, clothes, the hair, the urban landscape) are all deployed with a convincing sense of solidity ... In the fifth of the seven sections, things perk up with a betrayal that sparks a new energy, allowing the remainder of the book to move more quickly, become rather less hearty in tone, and engage more nimbly with matters both outside and within the world of domestic intrigue.\

Kevin Powers

MixedThe GuardianIt is a book of epic sweep, although a significant part of its achievement is to create the sense of a large scale within a tight format: it’s only 272 pages long. Another success is to handle the same themes of conflict, oppression and reconciliation as [his] first book, but to do so in such a strikingly different context as to create a strikingly different effect. It has to be said, though, that while the thematic focus is never in doubt, the narrative line in the civil war sections is sometimes too densely packed. Does Powers – who also writes poems that tend to depend on glimpses and glances rather than extrapolated stories – feel that it’s banal simply to set things fair and square before the reader? Possibly, and possibly with good reason. But the fact is that several of his characters aren’t given space to establish themselves strongly enough in our mind’s eye, and some elements of the drama feel blurred or hurried ... Powers is at his best when he contemplates scenes of inhumanity, considers questions of self-determination in a context of crisis, and weighs the lessons they teach about the need for loving-kindness ... while this means A Shout in the Ruins doesn’t have uniform intensity, it certainly confirms Powers as a significant talent.

Michael Ondaatje

MixedThe GuardianIn Ondaatje’s new novel, his eighth, his appetite for imprecision is stronger than ever (the title itself shrouds the action in a kind of twilight: the dimmed warlight in the wake of the blitz) ...
Ondaatje is a skilfully deliberate writer, and these secrets inevitably generate a certain degree of suspense ... But so regular is the pattern of uncertainty in this opening section of the novel, and so deep is the shading of motive and consequence, that it’s hard not to feel a degree of impatience ... we don’t really feel the threat on our pulses ... Rather than closing the book convinced that psychological insights have been generated by Jamesian withholdings, we might equally well feel that characters have been flattened by our simply not knowing enough about them, and that our interest in their doings is diminished by the same means.

Richard Flanagan

PanThe Guardian\"As the book effectively opens with a résumé of the entire plot, the central part of First Person involves a large amount of recapitulation; it is constantly in danger of grinding to a halt, no matter how often Flanagan tries to tease the narrative forward ... The components of First Person that don’t involve Heidl directly seem to exist at a strange distance from its centre, either because the characters are drawn too sketchily, or because Flanagan writes about them in prose of a different quality from the main part of his book ... In his final pages, Flanagan tries to reconcile these diverse elements by elevating his antihero to the status of a messenger from the future. It’s a bold move, but more interesting in terms of argument than character or style – both of which feel rather papery.\

Neel Mukherjee

PositiveThe GuardianRepeated words, pronouns not clearly referring to one character or another, flabbily padded phrases, irritating tics of style, eruptions of verbosity: there is so much distractingly bad writing in the first section of Neel Mukherjee’s new novel, it’s difficult to concentrate on what he is actually saying ... But anyone tempted to abandon the book at this point should persevere. Although later pages are still liable to congestion and carelessness, they are much better written. They’re also ambitiously and intelligently engaged with important themes – several of which are treated explicitly (deracination, the inequalities of Indian society), and one of which emerges more subtly, through clever and well-handled plotting ... This linked structure emphasises the value of life as life, regardless of wealth and status and circumstance. But it also conveys a sense of inter-relatedness that allows Mukherjee to say something about how families and communities work in general, and about how Indian society functions in particular ... At a time when the manifold dramas of migration are centre stage, we often hear writers making the sound of lamentation. The sound of grief is audible everywhere in A Sense of Freedom, but it never drowns out the voices insisting on their right to thrive. One of the most dynamic aspects of Mukherjee’s flawed but vital novel is that even while facing up to unhappiness it continues to show an affirming flame.

Orhan Pamuk, Trans. by Ekin Oklap

PositiveThe GuardianThe Red-Haired Woman, translated by Ekin Oklap, is driven by the same obsessions, but develops them in suggestive new directions ...it blends the close observation of details with the broad brushstrokes usually associated with myth-making and fables ... At every turn, Pamuk balances the actual against the symbolic. The well is a site of genuinely hard work, but also a dive into the subconscious ... As Cem and Ayse begin to see the larger political issues raised by these stories, so we start to read The Red-Haired Woman as a parable about present-day Turkey... In a novel less thoroughly aware of its own strategies, this authorial friskiness would seem clunky. Here it seems happily all-of-a-piece.

Mohsin Hamid

PositiveThe GuardianIn previous novels, Hamid has used a heavily inflected narrative voice to filter everything through a personality that is not his own, but which he nevertheless owns as the author...Exit West confidently adopts yet another kind of voice – a tone of radical simplicity that in the opening 50-odd pages borders on brutality, and makes every conversation, every detail, every scene feel at once vital and under threat ... The mixture of clarity and restraint in [certain] passages is very impressive, and confirms Hamid’s reputation as a brilliant ventriloquist who is deeply engaged with the most pressing issues of our time ... Hamid describes these threats in terms that deliberately echo some of the intolerant voices raised by Brexiters: there is a 'reclaim Britain for Britain' movement of 'nativists,' for instance, which soon forces a political crisis. And not only political. A major part of Hamid’s achievement in Exit West is to show how profoundly social damage will injure private lives – not only in obvious ways (physical injury, homelessness), but by hampering the ability to construct any sort of life outside their sphere of influence ... When he approaches his conclusion...his bare statement style works against him. Initially it compelled us to sup full of horrors. Now it seems a little thin, and therefore conveys a sense of wishful thinking.

Rory Stewart

PositiveThe New York Review of BooksThe aim in all three sections is to bring the region ‘back to life,’ and to use its sights and sounds and histories as a means of asking what is involved when a person says he feels at home in a place. But what sort of place is he talking about? Although he does at one point traverse a region that is actually called ‘The Marches,’ the geography of the book is much better suggested by his father’s term “The Middleland’ … Because Stewart’s family has lived in this region for several generations, he enters it at the beginning of his book with a clear idea of what he hopes to find waiting for him. But from the outset things don’t go as planned … Stewart manages to deepen and broaden his focus on cultural heritage in the central part of his journey. His richest material flows from the conversations with people he meets along his way.

Amos Oz, Trans. by Nicholas de Lange

PositiveThe Guardian\"...a very absorbing addition to his remarkable oeuvre ... Oz is more interested in the political and religious questions that surround them than he is in nuanced characterisation ... Oz presents the clash of idealisms in such a way as to allow Israel’s recent past to reverberate in the present, while at the same time connecting them to the much more ancient Judas story that fascinates Shmuel. It’s a complex and impressive achievement.\

John Banville

PositiveThe Guardian“At every turn (and the structure and setting of the book are very tight, so there aren’t many turns), The Blue Guitar leaves us in the hands of a character who wants to think big thoughts about the mess he has made of things, but who struggles to rise to the occasion.”